Robotic environments

Technological and conceptual advances in fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics, and material science have enabled robotic architectural environments to be implemented and tested in the last decade in virtual and physical prototypes. These prototypes are incorporating sensing-actuating mechanisms that enable interaction with their users and surroundings in real-time. While these prototypes obviously point towards a paradigm shift from inanimate towards animate architecture, they do not operate at building but at building component scale and do not address socio-economical or environmental aspects that affect architecture and society at large. This paper, on the one hand, critically discusses robotic prototypes built in the last decade at Delft University of Technology, on the other hand, it proposes a framework for future research envisioning robotic environments, as resizable, able to spatially expand or contract as well as move or be moved as needed. Such reconfigurable environments aim to validate the assumption that robotics incorporated in architecture improve efficiency of use due to multiple use of built space in condensed timeframes, while at the same time they advance technology for distributed autonomous robotic systems exhibiting collective behavior as well as test their application to sustainable architecture.